Download ARTHUR: Religion, Morality, and Conscience

ARTHUR: Religion, Morality, and Conscience.
Thesis: Religion is not necessary for morality, although the two can be related.
 What is Religion?
- An answer, guidance, purpose.
- Deterrent
- Sense of identity, culture, safety, comfort.
- Arthur:: beliefs in the supernatural powers that created and perhaps control
nature, worship and prayer, and organizational structures and texts.
 What is Morality?
- socially acceptable
- matter of opinion
- right and wrong
- Arthur: a tool for evaluation to behaviour of others and ourselves, and a tool
that elicits feelings of guilt at inappropriate actions.
Starts with Thought Experiments where we could have a religious society that lacks a
moral code and then a moral society that lacks religion.
3 ways Religions has been thought to be necessary for morality
- 1) Religion is necessary for moral motivation
Religion provides us with incentives and deterrents.
PROBLEM: People have lots of motives, apart from religious ones. We worry
about getting caught, or getting a bad reputation, or keeping up with the Joneses.
- 2) Religion is necessary for Moral Guidance
o We can only know the moral thing to do through religious teaching
and revelation
o PROBLEM:
 1) There’s way too much to know. This leads to the 2nd
problem.
 2) Knowing what to do through revelation is problematic
 2 kinds of Rev a) God’s words )God’s acts
 What counts then as revelation? Words or acts
 3) How do we interpret the revelation?
 The bible (and arguably other religious texts) contain
contradictory messages. How do I decide how to act?
- 3) Without Religion/God there could be no morality.
o Divine Command Theory
 An act (x) is morally good only because god says that x is
morally good.
o PROBLEM: Plato’s Euthyphro
 God says that an act is morally good because the act is in fact
independently morally good.
o Another Problem: What if God is arbitrary?
o Ontological Claim: The existence of morality does not depend on the
existence of religion.